KALW hiring sound engineer/sound designer

The KALW News team is looking for an experienced and creative sound engineer/sound designer to help mix our daily news magazine Crosscurrents. You’ll work alongside our senior engineer, James Rowlands, joining the ranks of top-flight sound designers who have engineered our show, including Roman Mars (99% Invisible), Colin Anderson (Maximum Fun), Seth Samuel (Deep Look), and Chris Hoff (The World According to Sound).

Crosscurrents airs Monday through Thursday evenings on KALW public radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our tagline is “context, culture, and connection,” and we deliver through sonically rich, thought-provoking, long-form stories and interviews. Our work typically uses a lot of natural sound from field recordings and frequently utilizes music to enhance the storytelling.

Your main duties will be to mix feature stories from scratch; shorten stories that have already been mixed; cut interviews; track reporters and our show host Hana Baba; mix the show, itself; and contribute your own ideas to the overall sound of Crosscurrents. Our show has a specific sound, and we want to retain this; but we are also open to adding to it, to improving it, to making it as great as we possibly can. So new ideas and thoughts on mixing and sound design are always welcome.

As part of its mission, the KALW News department trains many people in the art and craft of journalistic audio storytelling. It makes for a dynamic and energized newsroom with a changing cast. We have a steady team of experienced core staffers and contributors with whom you’ll work most closely, but you’ll also work with people who are still learning to do this work well.

This is an independent contract position for approximately 32 hours a week, Monday-Thursday.

Job Requirements:

Several years experience mixing in Pro Tools on deadline (preferably for other radio storytelling shows, podcasts, and the like).

A strong interest in and knowledge of music, and your own extensive music library